May 11, 2014

DONETSK, Ukraine — Snap referendums conducted by secessionists in eastern Ukraine in hopes of legitimizing their cause drew large crowds on Sunday, and unfolded in a carnival-like atmosphere that was celebratory in some places and lethally violent in others.

In Donetsk, the capital of one of the two provinces where pro-Russian separatists have declared “people’s republics,” there were balloons and loudspeakers playing Soviet-era songs, and families came to vote with children in tow. But outside the provincial capitals, the voting took place in such a state of raw chaos that in one town a man was shot to death by pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries on a sidewalk outside a polling station. ...

The referendums were roundly condemned from the outset, both in Kiev and internationally, as elections that could not possibly be free and fair, given the political turmoil enveloping the region. But while the results were unlikely to be accepted by anyone but the organizers and their Russian patrons as reflecting the democratic will of the majority, the turnout on Sunday appeared to at least demonstrate that the separatists had substantial popular support. ...

“I am voting because I don’t want war,” said one participant, Roman Agrisov, a 40-year-old steelworker, as he stood in a line that was three people wide and a hundred yards long, snaking out the door of Middle School No. 32 in Donetsk.
He and some fellow voters said they thought the referendums would deter the authorities in Kiev from pressing military operations to reassert control in the region. Others were less sure whether it would tamp down the unrest or stoke it further, but said they were voting anyway to reject the interim government in Kiev, which they consider illegitimate. ...

Galina Kuznetsov, an election volunteer overseeing this polling station, said in the morning that she was pleased with the way things were going because nobody was drunk. “You don’t see one person here with a bottle of beer,” she said. “Everybody is sober.”

But shortly after noon, a pro-Ukrainian volunteer militia backed by Ukrainian army troops who guarded nearby checkpoints swept in and broke up the voting in Krasnoarmiysk, though the organizers managed to carry off the cardboard boxes of ballots, presumably to count. ...

The scene darkened, with the voting already forgotten and a group of local men taunting the militiamen, who took up positions in City Hall and made a show of cocking their Kalashnikov assault rifles. One man in the group who advanced on them, ignoring warning shots over his head, was shot and killed, and another was wounded.

The good news is that Slavs (or at least northern flatland Slavs) generally don't hate other Slavs the way everybody in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Libya hates everybody else. While there has been lethal violence in Eastern Ukraine in the last couple of months, it has been more notable for scary scenes where the people involved manage to avoid killing each other. For example, here's a Tianamen Square-style confrontation between unarmed civilians and a military armored vehicle sent by the new government in Kiev:

Keep in mind that the unarmed local civilians putting their bodies in front of the war machine are terrorists who hate our freedom. Also, you may recall that the overthrown elected president of Ukraine never sent in the Army like this to confront protesters. Well, stop recalling that -- it just complicates the Narrative.

The danger is that, while Slavs are slow to fight, they are pretty good at having really big wars once they finally get going.

I can't imagine that President Obama is terribly happy to spend 2014 worrying about some part of the globe of which he knows nothing. He was planning to spend his second term's foreign policy on southeast Asia -- the "pivot to Asia" -- an area he is personally familiar with. But personnel is policy, and if Obama won't sack the underlings who have been in charge of this region for him, he'll get more of the same.

"But while the results were unlikely to be accepted by anyone but the organizers and their Russian patrons "

The NYT always lies. The organizers want into Russia and Putin is telling them no. He wants "federalization" of the Ukraine instead. He is not their sponsor. If he was, they wouldn't be chasing tanks with bare hands right now.

" in one town a man was shot to death by pro-Ukrainian paramilitaries on a sidewalk outside a polling station.

Two men were shot, both died. The pro-Ukranian thugs came to the polling station in armored trucks normally used by PrivatBank to transport cash. They had the logos on them and everything. PrivatBank is owned by the Israeli-Ukranian oligarch Kolomoyskiy who was appointed by the junta to be the governor of Dnepropetrovsk region. Steve has written about him. Kolomoyskiy has put up monetary bounties for "Moscow agents". He has bragged that he's paid some fantastic number of them already. The people of SE Ukraine have been smashing his ATM machines with hammers and dousing them with red paint which stands for blood. They are lots of pics of that online.

"He was planning to spend his second term's foreign policy on southeast Asia -- the "pivot to Asia" -- an area he is personally familiar with. "

Instead his nominal subordinates in the State Department have been forcing Putin to pivot to Asia (really just to China) harder and more quickly than he thought he would have to. China would never put sanctions on Russian gas.

Those terrorists in Ukraine also hate democracy. The even had the gall to have a referendum. Why would they do it when there is a perfectly legitimate government (consisting of people that speak different language and profess different religion) to tell them what to do? They probably have WMDs somewhere, too.

The referendums were roundly condemned from the outset, both in Kiev and internationally.

A spokesman for the White House said "The lesson of last fourty years, both in America and Europe, is that questions of such pressing importance can only be decided by the judiciary or technical experts in the civil service. If Russia truly wants to join the community of forward-thinking nations it must learn to litigate, bureaucratically stymie, or at last resort simply ignore the expressed will of its people."

"For those who can read Russian, you can find out about the sheer cruelty of our friends' actions in Odessa."

What basically happened is that pro-Ukrainian soccer hooligans (Nuland and co's best buds) stormed and destroyed a tent city of pro-Russian protesters. The protesters fled into a nearby building. The pro-Ukrainian thugs lit up the building with Molotov cocktails. They chanted and celebrated as the building was burning. According to Ukrainian authorities about 40 pro-Russian demonstrators burned to death. Pro-Russians are saying it was more than 100. Some jumped to their deaths from the windows to escape the flames. There's lots of video, including of the charred corpses. The hooligans filmed themselves wise-cracking about the corpses when they finally went in to observe the damage.

The US and the EU blamed the pro-Russians. Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, specifically blamed the incident on "Russian thugs". In Russia this event has been compared with the Khatyn massacre in which the population of an entire Belorussian village was herded into a barn and then burned to death during WWII.

Steve, in February you had a great post with great comments in regards to states, exerting power, and governmental legitimacy.

Today you wrote:Also, you may recall that the overthrown elected president of Ukraine never sent in the Army like this to confront protesters. Well, stop recalling that -- it just complicates the Narrative.

I have mentioned that Radoslav Sikorski and his clown friends from the EU told Yanukowich during the negotiations to the Deal of February 21st that he may never use force against the maidan protesters or else he delegitimizes his rule. Then after Yanukowich was ousted, the same Radoslaw Sikorski was adamant that force must be used against ukrainians/russians in Crimea and eastern ukraine to bring "peace".

This can be summed up as the hypocrisy of liberal democracy.

As a Pole, I follow Polish politics and Sikorski has been quiet and staying under the radar for some time. I wonder what he is up to?

Also, the early part of the revolution was centered on "Yanukowich" and how bad he was. Today, Yanukowich is completely irrelevant, a nobody in just 2 months after he left. What's he up to? Why isn't the media going after him if he was so bad in February? Seems like the manufactured revolution didn't go according to plan?

"The good news is that Slavs generally don't hate other Slavs the way everybody in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or Libya, hates everybody else."

The hateline is not Slav vs. non-Slav. It's Catholic vs. Orthodox. We saw that during the Serb-Croat conflict and it's again on display here. The most anti-Russian Ukrainians come from the heavily Catholic part of the Ukraine.

"Yanukowich is completely irrelevant, a nobody in just 2 months after he left. What's he up to?"

He went into exile in Russia. Held a couple of press conferences from there in which he condemned the people who ousted him. I don't think he'll ever be a factor in politics again. Things have become so polarized so quickly that Yanukovich and his party now seem like ancient history. The rebels are blaming him for doing nothing while his cops were beaten, burned and shot by the Maidan (US-backed) protesters, for betraying his own officers, for being too indecisive and for having been just as financially corrupt as his US-backed political foes.

The commander of the largest body of armed pro-Russian rebels in the Ukraine is a man named Strelkov. His force is holding the town of Slaviansk. Super smart guy. He idolizes the White (i.e. anti-Red) movement in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920 and has an old-world aristo officer's demeanor. He's fought in the Caucasus on Russia's side. Used to participate in military reenactments. Most of his troops are Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens. Most of their weapons were given to them by units of the Ukrainian army who were sent to fight them.

"The pro-Ukrainian thugs lit up the building with Molotov cocktails. They chanted and celebrated as the building was burning. According to Ukrainian authorities about 40 pro-Russian demonstrators burned to death."

This is the "official" point of view. We will never know the whole truth, just like we will never know who were the original snipers in Kiev. The survivors were saying that the fire was used as a coverup for some pretty disgusting things. This is also confirmed by the photos in which one can see corpses with burned hands and heads but undamaged torsos. Anyway, instead of scaring into submission the anti-Kiev rebels, this tragic event served as a rallying call for them.

What I find disgusting but not surprising is that Washington would not address reports in German press of about 500 ex-Blackwater and CIA agents "working" in Ukraine. The whole affair just stinks to high heaven. I think the audacity of our MSM in completely misleading the general public reached the whole new level. It seems that if tomorrow they start telling people that the Earth is flat, everybody will believe in it in a couple of months.

After the May 2nd massacre in Odessa a lot of people in Russia and in the rebel area wanted Putin to intervene. Some were sure that he would. He was silent for several days and then reappeared just to call for talks between the rebels and the government in Kiev. There's no chance of that occurring at all. He also withdrew Russian troops from the Ukrainian border and asked the rebels to postpone their referendum indefinitely. Essentially he told them that they're on their own. They did not listen to him and held their referendum as scheduled. It is now understood that Putin has no plans of repeating the Crimean scenario in the Donbass. The rebels in the Donbass will not surrender to the junta. The junta will not negotiate with them about anything. I don't know where this is going.

By the way, the Donbass, the area that has revolted, is probably the largest industrial region left in Europe. Coal mining and heavy machinery. Tough guys.

I would say that the number of victims right now is in the low hundreds. Unfortunately I don't see an end in sight. I can imagine lots of scenarios of how this would escalate, but how could it deescalate? It's also not clear to me why Putin decided against intervening after the massacres. Maybe he knows something that the public doesn't. If he ever supported the rebels, he did not support them with much. And there is a possibility that he never supported them at all.

This is the modern left at its best (and most unintentionally comical). An anarcho-syndicalist conference at a Portland university gets invaded by radical feminists. It ends with the police being called in.

You could tell Kiev had badly lost this round first when they couldn't prevent the people themselves from carrying out a referendum on self-determination (how pathetic is it that a unitary state sees two of its biggest provinces thumb their nose at the capital this way?)

But moreso when you started seeing pictures of polling places being run not by Polite Green Men with AK-100's, but the typical Election Polling Station Ladies - polite, elderly or rotund middle age ladies asking for ID and checking people off voting lists. Its kind of hard to make anyone believe Elections Ladies are terrorists.

When two provinces full of Elections Ladies are willing to risk 15 years in jail for helping organize and conduct an illegal Independence Referendum, the central (coup) government has decisively lost.

My sense is that (again who knows given media lies and so on) that Putin senses a disaster in the making, a big fight in the Ukraine should he take the eastern part, because then he'd have to take the western part and most of Europe would nuke up against him in panic. Would YOU trust Obama and Company?

Meanwhile most of Eastern Ukraine wants to be Russian as protection against Catholic oligarchs in the West, and the Western part wants to retain the industrial heartland.

This conflict has been frozen by first the Tsars, then Stalin, then Stalin's successors, and now is unfrozen. So there will be hell to pay, literally.

Meanwhile Obama can't replace his loser team. Who is he going to call, Hillary again? Kerry is it, unless you want to have:

That's the Democratic National Security apparatus. It is horrible. As Belmont Club has noted, the Democrats have basically nobody but low-rent racial demagogues and hustlers. John Kerry, dim bulb that he is, really is the best Obama can do.

Republicans could at least field guys who could find their ass with a map and a flashlight in the dark: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton. Whatever you think of the policies they helped shape, at least they knew the players, had a good idea of what motivated them, and understood guys like Putin pretty well. They didn't think Putin shared their values or was Hitler either. Just your typical ex KGB, operating in a different universe than say, Angela Merkel much less David Cameron. Any one of those guys would know generally the attitudes of East and West Ukrainians towards each other.

Not engage in fantasies like the team of Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry.

The Kiev regime might conceivably be getting frustrated by the apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of the average Ukrainian for opening fire on people when ordered to do so. They're reported to be trying to put together some sort of 'national guard' who presumably will have less qualms about following orders. No telling what sort of people they might recruit for that. We supposedly love elections, except for the ones that aren't sanctioned by us or produce the results demanded by our foreign policy mavens. Then they are terroristic enterprises. It would be nice to know how many times the phrase "paid Putin stooge", or variations of it, has been thrown around the internet by the various trolls out there. Mucho rubles being distributed wholesale these days.In other foreign policy news the Syrian jihadis and assorted rebels seem to be fading. If not blessed with victory or martyrdom where will the remnants go? Will they and their families be settled in the US under the refugee program? People who've gotten used to beheading and shooting people (all for a good cause of course) coming to a nearby neighborhood?

I'd love to believe that Nuland has scored an own goal. I want her to lose. But realistically most of the Western public has accepted the neocon view of the conflict in the Ukraine. You have to be very interested in this subject to even know that there is another view of it.

The public perception formed by the media is that Obama isn't standing up to Putin manfully enough, that Putin is an evil bully and that the Obama admin has been too weak in confronting him.

The actual facts - the coup in Kiev, the massacres in Odessa and Mariupol, the referendums in the Crimea and the Donbass - have been twisted beyond recognition in the Western media. The side that violently overthrew an elected government and conducted massacres of civilians has been declared good and the side that has conducted referendums has been declared bad.

Pew has just released a poll in the Ukraine and the Crimea. 88% of the Crimeans surveyed said that they wanted the Ukrainian government to recognize the results of their March referendum. Only 4% said that they didn't want the referendum recognized. An American polling firm has published this! Yet like the real nature of the 08/08/08 war over South Ossetia this will just be forgotten. The story that has already stuck in the Western public's mind is that Putin's referendum in the Crimea was a sham conducted under the barrel of the Russian army's guns.

And if another Gorbachov comes to power in Russia after Putin, he will rewrite Russian conventional wisdom on this as well so that after the death of the last contemporaries of these events their true nature will be forever forgotten everywhere. I'm sure that lots of historical truths were completely forgotten in this way before.

Ukraine needs billions. $50? $100? So far the US has kicked in exactly $1 billion.

The IMF is proposing a multi year, $15-$20 billion program of austerity. Dead out of the chute.

I wish the West would actually put up some serious money or shut the fuck up. There is all this blather about sanctions, as if the pain goes only one way. Europe doesn't want to cause problems with a still weak economic recovery.

It is simply a lie -- or horribly idiotic -- to believe that anything can be fixed in Ukraine without a lot of money being spent by someone. The US, the EU, the IMF (with its unfortunate record), or Russia. Or to believe that the 'cure all' sanctions will be effective (like they were in Cuba, Iran, &c) and cheap.

Putin is in no way idiosyncratic, the current Russian policies stem from a popular Russian reaction to the US being given everything it wanted by Yeltsin.

Russia has the very limited goal of keeping Ukraine from closer association with the EU/Nato and thus becoming a US satellte.

The Obama Administration has mobilised US opinion against Russia very effectively. Russia is backward, fragile and weak. far from being able to do less with more, it can't even effectively muster the strength it has in its Italy-sized economy to confront the West. it's basically dependant on China, which is the real winner in all this.

Unfortunately I don't see an end in sight. I can imagine lots of scenarios of how this would escalate, but how could it deescalate? It's also not clear to me why Putin decided against intervening after the massacres. Maybe he knows something that the public doesn't.

Here are some interesting dots for you to connect that were in the media recently.

(1) The Ukraine Army and Rebels had an informal agreement not to shoot each other - i.e. the Army had defacto mutinied along with the Police (and Elections Ladies).

(2) The killing is being done by National Guard (ill-disciplined and ill-trained recruits fresh off the Maidan from Svoboda's Maidan Self-Defence organized by Andrei Parubiy and Right Sector) as well as paid thugs forming Dnipro Special Battalian bankrolled by the Oligarch Governor of Dniperopetrovsk Kolomoisky. Think of it as a reverse Pogrom.

(3) Putin doesn't need to intervene. The rebels have held off the Kiev Forces to date, and have access to truck loads MANPADS and Anti-Tank Weaponry, heavy machine guns, and all the small arms they could ever want in the Slavyansk Arms Depot (underground Soveit era arms storage in abandoned salt mines).

(4) The unrest in Donbass is decidedly bad for business. The biggest business there are those of Rinat Akhmetov (the man and money behind the Party of Regions) and Sergei Taruta (Kiev appointed Oligarch Governor). Akhmetov's Metinvest has announced the formation of special armed squads to patrol Donbass, and this has surprisingly been welcomed Taruta, who has to recognize that his own fortune and position are obviously jeapordized by remaining alienated from the majority of the people. Taruta, for being a Maidan supporter, has been surprisingly passive throughout everything.

(5) Voter turnout and votes were 75-80% voting 90-95% for independence - i.e., about 70% of people are rejecting Kiev, and 5% publicly support Kiev, and rest are sitting on hands.

(6) Ukraine is a unitary state with little in the way of real local authority. Governor's, Mayor's, and Police Chief's are all appointed by Kiev. This leaves a power vacuum in the case of Kiev being unable to project authority, which is now being filled by the local people by men of charisma and daring. This is what is behind capturing administrative buildings. Capturing such a building and getting the people to keep working is essentially making a self-appointment as Mayor.

(7) There is one remaining task ahead not in the news, and that is for the locals to figure out how to control the flow of tax payments and the payment of state salaries and pensions. The key to this is going to be controlling the local banks.

Anonydroid at 9:23 PM said: Nuland is either grossly incompetent or working for Putin. Or maybe even Obama is working for Putin and "own goal"s are the point of this white house.

Hunsdon said: If those are the options, "grossly incompetent" is the top answer. Haven't you noticed the seething hatred for Putin that is, well, everywhere in the Western media? You can't fake that kind of visceral hatred. This is not a fight Russia started; this is a fight we started.

"This is the modern left at its best (and most unintentionally comical). An anarcho-syndicalist conference at a Portland university gets invaded by radical feminists. It ends with the police being called in."

They drone like pod people. They love playing victim though they seem pretty privileged. They attack 'white male privilege' because white males are nice. We don't see them pull this stunt in Detroit.

They chant 'we will not be silenced by your violence' but go out of their way to silence others.

I've asked questions about exactly how certain military operations could ever be conducted, and have never gotten an answer.

Too boring I guess.

But I'm curious as to how we could act "manfully" in Ukraine or any area very close to Russia's borders.

We could liberate Finland I think, if Russia decided to invade it. Or some other ridiculous thing that would actually get full support from the EU in conducting a military operation.

There are no military options in Ukraine. None, zero. If we conducted one it would be a miserable failure. Too many cards stacked against you in that theater.

You could do some showy special forces operation, but it would be risky to retrieve people. You could do an assassination (we normal people call it a "hit").

But there is absolutely no way for us to influence things over there militarily.

Additionally we do not have the capability to conduct a full blown war with China. I do not expect this to change.

We could conduct one with Russia, it would bankrupt us, and cost far more than you could ever sell the American public on. Not that I think even our politicians and vested interests entertain that one seriously.

And well, I wouldn't like our odds of winning if we did have a conflict with Russia. Unless they were so kind as to come to us, we would have to go to them. And that is just not a good situation for us, no matter how large our military spending.

Of course we could nuke both countries, if we ignore the fact they could nuke us in turn. Even if we triple special nuke them, an ordinary nuking from them would be a game ender.

So that's off the table.

So my analysis is that there is absolutely nothing we can do about this.

If it amuses you, as a corollary there is absolutely nothing Russia or China could do if we decided to invade Cuba, but that isn't of interest to anyone.

So all this talk is just that, talk.

Unless someone has a creditable description of how we send troops into Ukraine and not have it blow up in our face?

Or any place too close to mainland China.

I really don't think we could keep China from taking Taiwan if they ever got really excited about it. I'm sure I'll get lots of Tom Clancy fans writing something, but our Navy is going to be a looonnnng way from the Chinese coast if that balloon ever went up.

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